Media, Politics & Social Change

Lesson 149 Career Transitions

This week I announced that I will retire as vice-chancellor at the end of August. In January I will begin a new adventure as senior fellow in strategic and international communication in TCU’s John V. Roach Honors College and Schieffer School of Journalism. This comes after 46 years of association with one university, and after several months of deep reflection on an incredible lifelong odyssey.

A high school counselor once told me I probably was not college material, and that I better decide where I wanted to be in 5 years and set some specific goals to get there. Then, in junior college I met two teachers who opened the door to a world of ideas and helped me clarify my strengths and weaknesses. From that moment on I decided to focus on communicating ideas, and tried as best I could to minimize the consequences of my limitations. I never actually set firm goals and specific objectives.

When I arrived at American University in Washington I thought I might consider the foreign service. But I became involved in educational broadcasting, and soon decided that becoming a radio and television producer would be my future. But then as a graduate student I got involved in teaching and fell in love with the thought of immersing myself in a subject matter… media and communication studies.

Arriving at TCU I told some colleagues that all I wanted to do was teach and that I could not understand why anyone would ever go into administration. Then after 8 years of teaching I was challenged to help bring some innovative thinking to our evening college, summer school and non-credit programs, and surprised myself by taking the job. Later, another opportunity in central administration presented itself, this time with the challenge of bringing new thinking to communicating the institution. After adapting integrated marketing ideas to the academy, I found myself back in Washington in a government affairs position living out the observation, “What goes around, comes around.”

The lifelong career lesson learned for me was that setting specific goals could have been very limiting to my finding opportunities I never imagined. When I focused on what I did well, and minimized my limitations as best I could, opportunities appeared that I would have never planned.

Truthfully, I never thought about what I am now about to do until several months ago. Last fall I taught a colloquium with some of the best honors students on the planet, and still another new opportunity appeared. So here we go again.